I’ve been revisiting Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” which I finally got around to reading for the first time only within the past decade. (The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.) I wanted it to be fresh in my mind when I see Mason Bates’ new opera at the Met next week. I’m a little over halfway through (I was hoping to knock it out before the first of October so that I can get on with my Halloween reading), and I’m loving it all over again.

First of all, I sense in the author a kindred spirit, as he obviously adores all the pop cultural detritus that I myself have been lapping up since childhood. He also has an enviable grasp of the history and the social history of New York, a mindboggling eye for detail, and a real flair for crafting playful similes that makes Ray Bradbury seem positively drab by comparison.

Of course, there’s a lot of comic book lore, both real and fabricated, as the dynamic duo of Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clayman, cousins, one European and one native, are brought together in a Brooklyn tenement to pool their talents in the creation of an unapologetically antifascist superhero, The Escapist. (Recall when Jack Kirby had the temerity to draw Captain America punching out Hitler a year before Pearl Harbor.) The team is also, I assume, inspired in part by Siegel and Shuster of “Superman” fame, both in terms of a crafting one of the first comic book superheroes and also getting screwed by their publishers.

But the story is lent a whole other, higher-stakes dimension through Joe’s plight, his separation from his family in his own escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, and later his efforts to have his younger brother to join him in safety in the United States. Joe’s passage is lent a touch of magical realism in the inclusion of a genuine Golem (folkloric protector of the Jews). Quite the ponderous symbol! Golems and escapists and explorations of the true nature of heroism pervade the narrative. The backdrop of the war, the Holocaust, and the tragedy that propelled so many immigrants to the United States haunts the American dream at a time when the U.S. is about to emerge – thanks in no small part to the ingenuity and hard work of European refugees – as the mightiest and most vibrant force in the history of the world.

Chabon shuffles a magic card deck, interleaving characteristics of the American Jewish experience and those of their displaced brethren with the worlds of classic comics, escape artists, magicians, strong men, surrealists, pulp writers, radio actors, Greenwich Village bohemians, the Empire State Building, the 1939 World’s Fair, “Citizen Kane,” and too many other subjects to catalogue. There’s even mention of a Karol Szymanowski Society (and Szymanowski’s “Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin”)!

It’s the rare modern novel that I wish I had written. We’ll see what Mason Bates does with it. I’m happy to see that some of The Escapist’s exploits will be brought to life through choreography and projections. If nothing else, it will be a spectacle. But it will be the music, especially idiomatic, ingratiating writing for voice, that will determine whether or not the opera will have legs. I can’t for the life of me imagine how one can cram so much incident into an opera. I assume librettist Gene Scheer worked with the composer to pare down the novel to what they believe is its essence. I am amused to find Salvador Dali, at least, made the final cut.

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay” runs at the Metropolitan Opera through October 11.

https://www.metopera.org/season/2025-26-season/the-amazing-adventures-of-kavalier–clay/

Photos taken during my recent trip to Lincoln Center to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct the New York Philharmonic, with the exception of the one of The Escapist cleaning Hitler’s clock, borrowed from the Met’s Facebook page